Enrollment projections inaccurate

Friday

Jan 25, 2013 at 3:15 AM

With New Hampshire student enrollment projections showing a declining student population throughout the state, and with Oyster River school district projecting a “significant” decrease in student enrollment (approximately four hundred students), I found it interesting that Superintendent Hayes of Newmarket was using increasing enrollment projections as an impetus for new school construction.

Despite enrollment projections being provided to Newmarket school district annually by Dr. Donald G. Kennedy from NESDC, Superintendent Hayes commissioned, at taxpayer expense, an enrollment projection from Dr. Mark Joyce and Mr. Keith Burke which was completed in October, 2010.

Using these projections, Dr. Hayes laments an increasing student population as justification for closing the current facility of approximately eighty-eight thousand square feet as being inadequate, and justification for a new facility of approximately one hundred and eighty-eight thousand square feet.

While the 2010 projections do indicate a slight increase in student enrollment through 2020, what the projections also indicate, but has goes unstated, is that student enrollment in Newmarket has been steadily decreasing for more than a decade.

Any increases in enrollments through 2020 would in fact be an increase back toward previous enrollments of a decade prior, which the current facility accommodated and was the norm.

The authors of the 2010 report included several caveats in their report to include: “enrollment projections are more accurate in the immediate future than they are farther in the future …) and “projecting future student enrollments is a difficult task at best.”

Yet, Dr. Hayes used the most unreliable of all of the enrollment projections, those for 2020, as justification for new school construction at a projected cost of approximately $50 million. This is unconscionable.

However, the most serious malfeasance committed by Hayes, regarding enrollment projections, in my opinion, was his continued use of the 2010 report statistics to sell the idea of new school construction to the taxpayers despite his knowledge that the 2010 projections by Dr. Joyce and Mr. Burke were wrong.

The 2011-12 projected enrollments for kindergarten and first grade, according to the 2010 report, called for 121 and 134 students respectively. However, the actual enrollments for these grades, as reported to Dr. Hayes by NESDEC, reveals the actual enrollments for kindergarten and first grade to have been 85 and 79 respectively. Yet, Hayes makes no correction to the voters or indicates enrollments are continuing to decline instead of rising as projected.

Interesting to note, in grades 6-12 (NMJSHS) enrollments dropped significantly from a high of 596 in 2001/02 to 491 in 2010/11. Yet, despite these facts, Superintendent Hayes repeatedly uses the enrollment projections for 2020 of 577 students for grades 6-12 to decry the current facility as inadequate and to sell the new construction idea.

People are free, of course, to decide for themselves why Superintendent Hayes chose to use the most unreliable of all of the projections as the basis upon which to inform the public of the need for a new school, and why he failed to correct and update enrollment projections to the public when it became apparent the projections he used to sell new school construction were inaccurate. My beliefs are already well known.

Jeffrey T. Clay

Alton

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